When I was a little kid, my mother used to whip us with hot wheel tracks, so my brothers and I would always hide all the hot wheel tracks in a secret place in the crawl space when we were not playing with them.
My father only used corporal punishment on me once when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I had a massive chemistry set in the garage and was trying to make nitroglycerine one day and when my dad asked me what I was doing, I excitedly told I him. He very sternly said "Don't you ever, ever, EVER, try to make nitroglycerine in MY garage or I will whoop your skinny little ass!"
I could tell that he meant it.
So I relocated the nitroglycerine project to my neighbor's garage. In preparation, the day before I gave some money to my best friend next door to go down the street to a convenience store and get three bags of ice and put them in the freezer in his garage.
But unbeknownst to me, he bought the little one pound bags of ice, rather than the big seven pound bags of ice.
Then the next day as I was mixing the concoction I realized how fucked we were when I went for a bag of ice, and noticed that we only had three pounds of ice, when I had assumed that we had plenty of ice. Way more than we needed according to my calculations.
It's the definition of an "oh shit!" moment.
That wasn't nearly enough ice to keep the chemical reaction under control. It started smoking and caught on fire and we had to run away and call the fire department. The firemen and police then evacuated about a three block radius and let the fire burn out from a safe distance. My neighbor's garage and everything in it was a total loss.
Afterwords my dad was yelling at me, screaming that he told me that I wasn't allowed to make nitroglycerin and I had disobeyed him, and in my defense I pointed out the fact that he said I couldn't make nitroglycerine in his garage, and nothing about producing nitroglycerine in our neighbor's garage.
Then he called me a smartass, took his belt off, and whooped the living shit out of me.
